


came to make a connection (force myself in a dimension)

by plinys



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M, Friends With Benefits
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-22
Updated: 2014-08-22
Packaged: 2018-02-14 05:52:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 921
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2180406
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/plinys/pseuds/plinys
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“This isn’t romance,” she tells him the first time it happens, “I don’t do romance.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	came to make a connection (force myself in a dimension)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bonzai_bunny](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bonzai_bunny/gifts).



> Inspired by a HC posted over on tumblr that I couldn't help but turn into a fic.

They have this thing going.

It’s a good thing most nights, when he can fool himself into believing that it’s all he wants.

“This isn’t romance,” she tells him the first time it happens, nearly breathless and inches apart, she pushes the words out creating space between them, “I don’t do romance.”

“I know,” he answers, because he knows that it’s what she wants to hear and it has her kissing him again.

Saying that is the only way this will happen. So he goes on pretending that each kiss, that each gentle caress is just an act, just a means to an end, a way to get relief.

They’re just friends she insists, nothing more than that, nothing less.

Maybe he’s just old fashioned, but what they do feels like something more than friends.

They each have their way of keeping the walls up, to keep what they have firmly in the realm of friends with benefits (and term explained to him over a cup of coffee on one lazy morning) and far from anything that could resemble normal.

Every time they get too domestic, too close for comfort she’ll make sure the walls stay up with her ‘casual suggestions.’

They’ll go days without it when training or on missions, hours where the walls are almost down, where he can almost see the other side.

But the second things push too far, the second they settle down to watch a movie and end up sitting just a bit too close or when they’re eating dinner just the two of them at some restaurant with a name he can’t even pronounce, that’s when she’ll bring it up again.

They’ll be standing in a the grocery store politely arguing over which breakfast cereal to grab, a debate that she will always win because a small part of him knows  if he keeps grabbing the kind she likes that she’ll stick around in the morning to eat with him.

When she’ll turn around and point somebody else, the single mother trying to get her kids into a shopping cart, the co-ed stocking up on cheap microwave dinners, the healthy junkie with a card full of vegetables and protein shakes, and say “what about her?”

He dismisses them all too quickly, with excuses like “I’m not ready for kids” or “could you image eating that every night,” and plaster on his best smile when she just keeps insisting that she’ll find somebody for him soon enough.

She’ll ask the clerk checking them out if she’s single, with a mischievous grin that will make the poor thing flush as she tries to bag their groceries.

“You’re terrible,” he informs her.

But she just grins at him like she’s a million bucks and says, “you know you like it.”

And that’s not the only think he likes about her, not by a long shot, but he can never say that, never get the words past his no longer frozen lips. So, he just shakes his head and lets her continue with the game.

The game is the one thing that separates this from getting too real, as long as she can keep pointing people out for him, and he can keep refusing them, then they get to keep pretending that they’re nothing more than friends.

One night he had finally figured out the one way to silence the words, that if he was lucky he could kiss her, quick enough that she forgets about hooking him up with her gym buddy or that girl from finance, and she’d kiss him back.

Of course, they never stay with just that, not on that night or any ones that had come before it.

Their movie is forgotten, their take-out grows cold on the coffee table, and for a brief moment in time nothing else matters other than them. The world seems to stop; every bad thing that has happened to lead them up to this point melts away, as they reach out towards each other desperate for release.

They move together, towards the wall, towards the bed, to anywhere that this can happen.

He’s almost afraid to let go at times, even as he leans back and watches her pull her shirt over her head exposing herself before him, because he worries that she won’t come back.

She does though, and it’s just as wonderful as every night before, the air just as electric around them.

It’s one of those nights, one of the one’s that feels a bit too real.

Which is why he’s not surprised in the least when she sits up, letting the thin sheets pool around her waist, putting distance between them as soon as everything is said and done.

“As I was saying before you interrupted me,” she says, pushing her hair out of her face like a curtain, in order to glance over at him in a way that is no longer coy or desperate, but the cool and collected look of ‘nothing more than friends’ that she insists they are, “the girl from my gym, I can’t remember her name right now, but she’s really cute, nice butt, you’d like her.”

“I don’t need anybody,” _else_.

That’s the one word he can’t say, that he can’t manage to find a way to force out from his lips.

But he’d be a fool if he didn’t expect her to read between the lines.

“You know I’m not an option,” she reminds him none to gently.

“I know.”

“You’re a terrible lair, Steve.”

 


End file.
